Ellis Hobbs had the ball and a good head of steam. Josh Brown had the angle, and the sideline.

Hobbs, bidding for the New England Patriots’ first kickoff return for a touchdown this season, already had reversed his field and left 10 St. Louis Rams in his wake in the fourth quarter last Sunday. Then Brown, St. Louis’ sixth-year kicker, lined him up and knocked him down.

Hobbs settled for a 49-yard runback ... and some inevitable ribbing about getting dropped by you-know-who.

“Man, I had no gas,” Hobbs confessed afterward. “You get to that time in the game, and you’re tapping the X-button. There ain’t nothing working.”

Dark day for the kick-returner fraternity, obviously.

Proud day for kickers, though.

“I didn’t even see it, but, sure,” Stephen Gostkowski said with a smile. “Everybody says you shouldn’t get tackled by a kicker, but whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made a couple of tackles.”

Couple of field goals, too. Actually, plenty of them. Sixteen this season, in 17 tries. Nine out of 10 in October, enough to earn him AFC Special Teams Player of the Month honors on Thursday.

Enough to officially erase the memory of Adam Vinatieri? Well, you can’t go that far. The ex-Pats kicker rightfully will live on forever here in those “3 Games to Glory” DVDs. But the current guy is pretty good, too. So good that right now you wouldn’t trade him for anybody, including Vinatieri, who will be on the other sideline at Lucas Oil Stadium Sunday night when the Patriots (5-2) visit the Colts (3-4).

This will be the third Gostkowski-Vinatieri matchup since Vinatieri bolted to Indy as a free agent in the spring of 2006 and the Patriots, a month later, tabbed Gostkowski, the pride of Memphis, as his replacement. (Technically, Gostkowski had to beat out Martin Gramatica in his first training camp, although even the thought of that seems utterly absurd now.)

Anyway, Gostkowski has hit five of six field goals in those head-to-heads. Vinatieri is 7-of-10, and his misses include a 50-yarder last year at the RCA Dome (Richard Seymour partially deflected it) and a 46-yarder at Gillette Stadium in their first showdown in 2006. Both kickers seemed a little skittish that night – Gostkowski (36) and Vinatieri (37) each missed relative chippies in the third quarter – but Gostkowski said the pregame hype about Vinatieri’s return to New England didn’t faze him.

“It was just another game to me,” he said. “I had never met the guy before. He’d never met me. He wasn’t mad that I came here, and I wasn’t mad that he left. It’s not like there was any personal vendetta.”

Nonchalance, of course, is what you want in a kicker, and Gostkowski seems to have the hey-whatever approach down cold. Raise your hand if you had any doubt that he would drill that game-tying 41-yarder against the Rams last week.

Page 2 of 2 - Thought so.

“Ever since I was able to kick them, I try to make as many in a row as I can,” said Gostkowski, who is tied for seventh in the league in scoring with 63 points. (Vinatieri is No. 31 with only 33 points – an illustration of just how off the Colts offense has been so far.) “I don’t look ahead to the next kick. I always feel when I go out there that I’m going to make the kick. It hasn’t changed from Year 1 to Year 3, college or anything.”

Gostkowski said he’s indebted to Vinatieri, whose playoff heroics have “given kickers a lot more respect.” Gostkowski still doesn’t have a signature kick to equal any of Vinatieri’s. But he’s made 85.7 percent of his attempts as a pro (playoffs included). That’s an outstanding number. It’s also higher than Vinatieri’s success rate as a Colt (84 percent).

Throw in some fine work on kickoffs – he’s No. 2 in the league with 12 touchbacks – and Gostkowski might just be the most consistent Patriot so far. Receiver Wes Welker, defensive end Ty Warren, left tackle Matt Light and long-snapper Lonie Paxton also would be in the discussion.

“There are days when you go out there and you feel like you can’t kick it anywhere you want it to go, and there are days when you feel like you can’t miss,” Gostkowski said. “You just gotta ride the wave.”